Brunei's Most Expensive Stamps

Sometime last week, someone bought an American 24 cent stamp which had an inverted plane for around US$825,000.00! Imagine that. But surprisingly that is still not the most expensive stamps ever. The most expensive is a Swedish 3 skilling stamp which was the wrong colour. That sold for around $2.5 million about 10 years ago. A number of other stamps could beat that if only they come onto the market.

How about Brunei stamps? How much are they worth? I have never seen one come up in auctions. But the catalog values of a few of them, believe it or not, do reach a 5 figure sum. One of the most expensive is Brunei's 1906 stamp which is a Labuan overprint. In 1906 when Brunei wanted to set up its own postal service, its stamps did not arrived in time and the government chose to use the Labuan stamps and overprint on top of it the word Brunei and the value of the stamp. In a couple of cases, the word disappeared and the values got printed twice. This stamp would easily fetch $20,000.00. Another one is the Japanese overprints. When the Japanese invaded Brunei, they overprinted the Brunei stamps. However one particular overprints (see photo) is on the 1 cent stamp. This one is currently on offer at ebay for an opening price of US$8,850! This particular one has a catalog price of aound $17,500 because it has two Japanese overprints.